what is cliteracy?
Grosz's call for a feminist reconfiguration of time/space, and Braidotti's discussion of Deleuze's ideas of becoming and nomadism, suggest some theoretical adjustments to better account for women's regimes and desires using digital interfaces as they are now. The subversive knowledge I playfully call cliteracy destablizes writing/typing and mind/body binarisms constructed in terms of lack. Cliteracy would unsettle distinctions between writing, research, health care, coding and navigation through digital space/time, by gathering them together in the (femme) bodily space of the 'key bank'.
Many children are fond of small interfaces that yield big washes of sensory effect. My daughter's 8-year old fingers are adept with the Gameboy's tiny buttons and control stick. When her friend Thien comes to visit, he brings his Rumble Pack, an attachment that makes the controller quiver at exciting moments in the game. Kids carry these personal hand-vibrators in their knapsacks for play dates. Their whole bodies sway and move to events in the game produced by their fingers. My colleague Paul joins in their games. We draw inspiration from them for the interactive projects we make. These movements of fingers are under-explored; the clitoral correlatives are obvious and productive of the type of writing/movement I describe as 'cliteracy'.(5.)
" Deleuze's contention (is) that the process of becoming entertains intimate ties with that of writing or creativity." (Braidotti, 120)
The computer provokes a play of foldings of bits of time and degrees of attentiveness, drift, curiosities; a dance between e-mails swollen with unopenedness, bits of programming languages, sudden desires to trace, draw or write. The movement is non-linear, quick as minnows, as if fishing in thought.
"In his work on becoming animal Deleuze acts upon the idea that the activity of thinking cannot and must not be reduced to reactive ('sedentary') critique." (Braidotti 124)
Here the play is between the words 'reactive' and 'sedentary', provoking speculations about the quality of embodied intellectual motion. The tiny physical movement of fingertips producing large washes of effect suggests the increasing sensitivity and intensities of a woman's pan-orgasmic threshold. Note here the completely different character of female 'orgasm' from the male 'orgasmic' prototype of tumescence/detumescence. (Grosz 203) On this plateau, pleasure dips in and out of orgasmic pangs for as long as one is interested in staying there, or until the sensation gradates into an oversensitive irritability or sleepiness. Peaks are triggered over an ever-widening zone of alert skin, so that touch taps on other sites than the (centralized, over-sensitized) clitoris.
The disarray of desire dissembles the body's scale, as the skin's surfaces take precedence and recede. The body's size and structural proportion enter flux, shrinking, bending and extruding, in potent washes of sensitivity. This pleating and twisting of others and surfaces resembles the entwining of play, pleasure and responsibility - the flux of housework that shifts objects and ideas from level to level, room to room. Fingertips on keys, the physical dance of electronic writing, folds into full-handedness with other activities.
"The fox.. is mercurial and quick in picking up many varied sources of information and adapting them to its purposes foxes pursue many ends, albeit unrelated and contradictory ones, without ever trying to fit them into a unitary scheme." (Braidotti 126)
Don't go up the stairs empty-handed - a very old technique from my mother. As with other urban animals, the fox's rounds and routines are opportunistically omnidextrous (smelling, sharpening, stretching, nibbling : a story told, all too often I think, in terms of 'marking' and 'territory' rather than shifts and drifts of attentiveness typical of contemporary embodied communication). This pleating of tasks, curiosity, drift and desire, has only recently occurred to me as something happening and not something before something is happening.
What Braidotti describes as Deleuze's 'zigzagging itineraries' is capitalized upon in Mac OS X - the new operating system, an architectonics modeled not on the solid desktop, but on semi-transparent scrims, sheers of information. I remember my bedroom as a girl; the windows had blinds, curtains and sheers, each with its appropriate density and decency; different vistas and veiling effects for different times of day. The operating system is fabricated on a model of holding many ideas, many projects, in a simultaneity effect differentiated by degrees of opacity at any given moment; these are wrapped around UNIX, a robust coding language. What is being commodified here is a mind-model where the alphanumerics of programming (keyboard code) is veiled in variably transparent layers of software scrims. I don't use this system because I anticipate an unpleasant palimpsest between the way my mind works and the industrial design of what they think is the way my mind works. Help unwanted. Annoying and constant conflicts (like the green underlining perpetually correcting my grammar in Microsoft Word 8). One can only avoid an operating system for so long, then the implications become profound, for example, the commitment to LINUX and open-source software. Feminist readings of intellectual copyright, piracy and the information commons are beyond this paper's scope, though certainly relevant.
Cliteracy reads consistencies of touch. As I look around me now, I see things I touch so constantly they are embedded with oily grime within a matter of days, requiring fingernail scratching to dislodge. The keyboard, an amalgam of typewriter and calculator side by side. To its right, a graphire tablet with optical mouse and pen tool. This is the slipperiest mouse, favoured for its almost weightless glide. The pen tool we use only for drawing and tracing into the computer. This team is crashy, finicky, in regular conflict with extensions from other software, especially sound/music programs. Below is the old, clunky wired-in mouse. Like rain boots in mud or writing with your other hand. Very unpleasant mouse, but never crashes. Backup. Workhorse. Behind the keyboard, the midi-keyboard, shaped exactly like a piano keyboard, but with no sound of its own.
These share a table with cats, pages of photocopies and handwriting, a digital camera, glass, books, lamp, window sill, pencils and tape dispenser. These are not graphic signifiers, a distinction which the system architecture aims to confound. On screen is ubiquitous imagery of buttons, knobs, dials, cables and other touch-controls of days gone by. Like the trace of cursive writing in a serif font, graphics reprise past interfaces as navigational signifiers for awhile, until new image repertoires become familiar.
For me, writing is integrated with other art activities, cohabiting the same 'office' of drift and experiment. The keyboard process of ecriture feminine has seeped into filmmaking, coding and interactive design. One is not 'about' the other, they are folded into adjacency, parallel playing, pleated. This was prompted by very specific engendered reasons in my case. For experimentation, I couldn't afford the hourly studio rental at artists' film/video access centres combined with child care costs; more importantly, I'd grown to loathe the monotonous sense of estrangement from my daughter, my other activities and my own place. The cost of technology had fallen, my competence rose, and circumstances allowed for a technological domestication. It provoked a change in creative process. Boundaries relaxed between writing, digital and time-based authorship, prompting a different kind of experimentalism, with a new set of estrangements and breakdowns.
Cliteracy calls for reconsideration of our contact zones with mechanisms. In artist-run culture, attention to cliteracy would shift focus from (re)production (institutions for equipment rental/distribution) to breakdown (support services and discursive opportunities). This could include re-purposing institutional space from machine paradigms (classes named after technologies, i.e. video and film) or disciplines (publishing, writing, drawing) toward cross-disciplinary investigation (where, for example, time-based meets digital/interactive, or writing meets music, or sculpture meets curation). Access could be reformulated around portable units and accessories, discursive and embodied meeting places, and temporary coalitions. (6.)Teachers might expand their roles as mobile agents (including house calls, guiding through public space, and triggering embodied experience). This contamination of institutional coherencies would promote the physical co-presence of bodies and neighbours, to enhance and counter the solitary regimes of the home/office/studio.